


you do not have to be good

by Azaphod



Series: epilogue [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon Asexual Character, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Insomnia, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Touch-Starved, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:20:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26901271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azaphod/pseuds/Azaphod
Summary: The only real unfortunate downside to its withering old age was that it creaked like the undead rising from the grave with the slightest shift from its occupant. An annoying development if said occupant were a light sleeper (which Jon is not, if several sources are to be believed) or if one were attempting some rather...risquemaneuvers (which Jon is definitely, entirely and completely,not.)So it really shouldn't be a problem. Unless you were planning on sleeping next to an ex-policewoman, who rouses to even the tiniest disturbance in the air. Then it might be a problem for that very specific hypothetical.
Relationships: Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist/Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Series: epilogue [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1963723
Comments: 6
Kudos: 52





	you do not have to be good

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings for: Mentions of unspecified eating disorder and canon typical beholding hunger pains (Jon), mentions of violence, burns, and scars. 
> 
> The nature of Jon and Daisy's relationship is deliberately complicated, and can be seen as platonic or romantic. 
> 
> Takes place during season 4. (Title is from a poem from Mary Oliver)

The dogged survival of the cot squirreled away in document storage never ceased to amaze him. It had seen years of hardship through worms, strangers, and wild dogs. It may as well be a veteran, for all Jon cared, noteworthy enough he sometimes had the bizarre urge to type up a shining five star review for the battered thing. 

_'Ideal if one cannot go home ever again and now sleeps in the basement of their workplace. Best combined with a particularly soft and/or fluffy throw and pillow.'_

Hm. Perhaps not. 

The only real unfortunate downside to its withering old age was that it creaked like the undead rising from the grave with the slightest shift from its occupant. An annoying development if said occupant were a light sleeper (which Jon is not, if several sources are to be believed) or if one were attempting some rather... _risque_ maneuvers (which Jon is definitely, entirely and completely, _not._ )

So it really shouldn't be a problem. Unless you were planning on sleeping next to an ex-policewoman, who rouses to even the tiniest disturbance in the air. Then it might be a problem for that very specific hypothetical. 

"If you don't settle down, I'm going to handcuff you." Daisy growls out from the floor, without much bite but still enough to make him flinch, another loud squeak from the cot's frame.

“Ah, sorry.” 

He resolves to keep still, to _go to sleep already, it's been hours_. He closes his eyes, and knows that upstairs his laptop’s battery is slowly draining away left open on his desk, and in the break room something that might have once been a lo mein has turned festering and potentially sporous, practically a seed of the Corruption at this point. Just above him, a woman walks the pavement and goes right past the Archives without a second glance on her way home, she carries a small baton in her bag but she _knows_ it won't protect her from what she really fears-- 

An unexpected draft of cool air jostles him from his wandering thoughts. Bewildered, he looks down. 

He had been in the process of pulling the blanket off, legs tensed for the motion of standing up. 

Jon breathes out a long, shuddering sigh. He is no stranger to hunger pains. They had dogged every step of his life well before the literal thirst for fear drenched knowledge settled in. There had been countless nights like this, stained with the dull throb of pain in his gut, but in the past, he never felt any motivation to _do_ anything about it. Too tired to eat, to move; too nauseous, too nervous, too destructive. The reasons hardly mattered.

But this...this wasn't a normal hunger pain.

He flips over again, staring at the blank nothingness that covers the ceiling, and Daisy huffs out a short sound below him. 

" _Sleep_ , Sims." 

"Sorry." he says again, reflexively. Apologies seem to be the only things passing through his lips these days. "I can leave." 

Daisy snorts, "And go where?" 

A small, viciously nasty feeling rises in him like an old friend. "I'll sleep at my desk, I'm keeping you up, anyways I think I left my laptop--" 

"Sit down." 

His mania fueled rambling cuts short, and he blinks. He had been trying to stand up, again. 

The urge to bare his teeth and dig in his heels fades as quickly as it had come, bringing another wave of exhaustion down heavily onto his spine. He lays back down.

The silence is eager to welcome him back, meandering thoughts and all. 

He distinctly feels like he’s about to scream.

So he decides, _fuck it,_ and throws precaution to the winds, letting his arm jut out over the inky abyss where the cot ends, where Daisy pretends to sleep on a borrowed camping bag--which smells, faintly, of old blood.

His fingers curl over empty air, trembling. 

Then her hand, rough and calloused, like he knew it would be, just barely wrapping one of her fingers around his, hesitant. Then once he doesn't pull away, snaking around and in between his fingers as if to consume him, the both of them greedily drinking in the sensation of skin on skin.

"I don't think I'm all that…here. Present." he tries, closes his eyes, and knows and sees and feels. 

Daisy's grip turns vice tight around his fingers, forcing a small gasp from his lips. It hurts, he swears he can feel his fragile bones shift and creak under his skin but it drags him back to earth with startling clarity; it is the only thing he can feel in the moment and he is instantly addicted to it. 

She slackens up a little, to his disappointment. But she doesn't let him go. "This helps." 

Not a question. He nods into the darkness anyways. He's not sure if she can see him, and now he's trying not to know if the Hunt gifted her any abilities in that direction, spiraling into how useful it would be to see in the dark and the applications she might employ it towards--and it's like holding back the ocean. He bites his lip hard and squeezes her hand until he trembles with the effort. 

"Budge over, then. This angle is killing my joints." Daisy grumbles, moving as a dark shape through even starker darkness; rising from the floor, slow and methodical, just a tick too unnaturally. It raises the hairs on the back of his neck, all the way to his arms, a primal alarm bell of wrong ringing. Prey spotting predator, and all that. 

Jon budges over.

Or, he tries to. The cot really isn't meant for two, despite how thin and gangly Daisy has become. So she hoists her leg across him so she straddles his thighs, pinning him to the cot with her weight and looming over him ever so slightly. 

"Alright?" she asks. 

He nods, "Good." 

“I’m going to touch you now.”

And then she does. There isn’t anything poetic or deliberate about it; she isn’t unnecessarily rough with him, but she isn’t entirely gentle. She doesn’t seek anything out, it isn’t the insensitive pat down for narcotics or shivs. She just...touches. Feels. Pauses whenever her fingers find a scar, and lingers over it; thumbs dipping into the worm holes that spiral unevenly down his shoulders, over his arms. 

He can feel the unnatural nagging in the back of his head tug sharply, and then, relax. He fists his hands into the blanket underneath him, twists until the tremors that run down his arms are stifled. 

She skirts around his neck, shying away from the hollow of his throat and the curve of his jaw, focusing her attention to the soft skin of his eyelids, obediently falling closed to allow her fingertips to brush over them, featherlight. He tilts his chin into the touch and he can feel the _burn_ of her gaze on the exposed stretch of throat, wonders if she can see the thick slash of scar tissue she had put there. 

The normal instincts of his mind still rebel; the ones that insist he struggle and buck and get as far away from her as possible. But despite all of it, he slips into a slow moving calm, content to let Daisy explore as she pleases.

“Want to talk about it?” she asks, sounding so very close. 

“This, you mean?” she taps her fingers, twice, against his temples. Confirmation. “I-Hm, I don’t remember the last time someone touched me without the intention for it to hurt.” 

He is stopped before he can spiral into that thought any deeper--introspection, it will always be his enemy--because her thumb is touching his bottom lip, pressing down lightly and then retracting. 

“The-the _noise_ gets quieter like this, it’s not silence but not...Deafening.” Jon continues, frowning at his own clumsy wording. He has spent so much time with other people's words in his mouth that his own feel almost foreign on his tongue.

“Maybe I _should’ve_ handcuffed you.” 

It’s a joke, but he still exclaims a scandalized gasp. “Daisy!”

She laughs, but not for long, like it hurts her to try. 

"Does this do anything for you?" he asks, curious. 

She pauses, a hand curls around his shoulder, nails catching, slightly. "I get to hold you." 

He knows better then to accept that as a declaration of bare affection, as a romanticism. He feels many things for Daisy, but--well. 

There are a lot of ways to hold someone. 

Gently, a lover's embrace, he barely knew what those felt like; a familial touch, his grandmother, when she felt like it, even earlier memories that have faded of a mother and father. Passionately, _possessively_ , cradling the pulse between one's teeth. 

Still, when her hands drift low, rucking up the bottom of his weathered t-shirt, thumbing over the odd ridges of his hip bones, he feels an acute jolt of-- _irrational_ \--fear. 

"You know I don't--" 

"I know. I don't want that." she says, blunt. "You need to eat more." 

He masks his sigh of relief with a breathy laugh. "Know any good horror stories?" 

"I could name a few." It's worded as a tease, but it comes out like an offering.

He doesn't reply. He doesn't want to ask if she means it--He doesn't want to _know_ if she means it, he doesn't want to accidentally tear it out of her and like how it tastes.

She pokes him in the stomach, hard. 

He frowns. “ _Ow_?”

“Seriously though, when’s the last time you ate a sandwich or something?” she asks, soothing a hand over the slight amount of fat his body still desperately clings to by his navel. “I’m taking you out to that Mediterranean place tomorrow, do us both some good, I think.”

 _Two monsters walk into a restaurant,_ he thinks, wildly. “Are you quite finished?”

“Nope.”

He grumbles incoherently for show, but her attention shifts and she ignores him.

Curious, she pries one of his hands away from its death grip on the blanket. He goes immediately lax, the tremors probably very apparent, but she simply turns his wrist this way and that, tracing the jutting veins that vanish under heavy, melted scarring. 

He isn't a _vain_ man, or he hasn't been in quite a long time, for his sanity's sake. But her unwavering scrutiny over the molten remains of his palm has him shrinking a little, regaining some of his higher functions to tug at her hold, which of course, only strengthens in response. 

"Hurts?" Daisy checks. 

Jon struggles for an answer, torn, then-- "Not physically." 

"Too much?" 

"I don't know." 

He waits for the reprimand, the snide _'I thought you could know everything?'_ , but it doesn't come. Daisy traces ghost patterns across the melted flesh of his palm, sensations that he both feels and doesn't, an odd tingling of pins and needles. Her fingertips dip into an odd moat in the center of his palm, spanning the entire length of it horizontally. 

Her breath comes out slow, controlled. "I did this too." 

His punches out of him like a dam has broken in his chest, painful. 

The shovel had been worn, it had spent a lifetime in the use of Alice _‘Daisy’_ Tonner, and it warped to the grip of her hands, bent to accommodate her brutality. The plastic handle had long since turned sharp, corroded by sweat and blood, the shaft prickly with fraying wooden splinters. 

Jon's bandage had already soaked through with fluid from his struggling, gumming up in between his fingers. He held the shovel in his trembling hands and felt the plastic _bite_ , the splinters _dig_. The first _stab, heave,_ and _heft_ of earth had wrenched a sob from deep within, though he was desperate to stifle the rest as he dug a tomb to bury a man made of sky. 

Behind him, the hunter watched him work, unflinching. By the time he dropped the shovel, the grip was coated in a sheen of sticky red, and his hand was dripping to the wrist, the bandage heavy, bulging.

His hand was never going to heal properly, not the way a burn like that should. But after that--

"Yes." he croaks into the air between them, choking on his gasp, pinpricks of shameful tears in the corners of his eyes. 

Daisy is still above him, coiled tight with tension. She makes a noise, the start of a sentence cut short, strangled back with a bite to her tongue. 

He shakes his head, and the shaking echoes throughout his body in a wave. There are many things she could say, all of them would be wrong and he doesn’t think he could bear to hear them. 

His wrist slips and then she’s holding his hand instead of grasping it, fingers intertwined softly, gently; the pressure is unpleasant against his scars, her skin cold from poor circulation, his almost hot to the touch, an after effect of the Desolation, perhaps. He can feel the barely there strokes of her thumb, and he knows they need each other, more then either of them can bear to think. 

Yes, he feels many things for Daisy Tonner.

He finds his courage hiding somewhere between his ribs, and collects it in the seat of his palm, his free hand raising off the cot. It flinches when he makes contact with the side of Daisy’s face, but he keeps it where it is, fingers mapping her scars now, curling up into the short strands of her hair. 

Like he had removed the pins keeping her in place, Daisy bows, exhaustion and gravity working together in delicate tandem, until her face presses into the crook of his shoulder, one of her hands resting limply across his chest. 

She mumbles something, known only by the tickling vibration against his neck. He thinks briefly that her weight atop him should frighten him, should send him reeling back to being Buried and Entombed. But she is warm, and she breathes softly into his skin and she is so light now, stripped of her claws and sharp teeth. 

“Daisy,” he says like a prayer, the words he meant to follow stay stuck in his throat. 

They really, _really_ cannot both sleep in the cot though. If not for Daisy's arm caging him in, he would be dangerously close to sliding off the side. As it is, she's only next to--and slightly on top of--him because of the iron tight grip she winds around his hip. 

It's uncomfortable, they're both made of bony elbows, sharp chins, cold feet and knocking knees. Her nails are digging into his skin and his hair has to be in her face. Their hands still clasped, bent at a horrific angle, but defiantly together. 

They cannot fall asleep like this. 

And yet, his eyes slipping closed, weighed down by lead heavy exhaustion. And yet, Daisy, her breath hot against his skin, evening out. 

_And yet…_

**Author's Note:**

> yall can find me on tumblr @godshaper


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